Dabble is a video search and social community. We index video from around the web (like at Youtube, iFilm, Brightcove, Comedy Central, Revver, etc) and make it searchable, though the video continues to live out at those sites. We also have a social community that selects video it finds interesting for discovery. Mary Hodder founded Dabble in 2005. Before that, Mary worked at various live web search companies, blogged at Napsterization.org stories about disruptive technology and Biplog.com on intellectual property, security and privacy from a technology builder’s point of view. Mary holds a Masters in Information from UC Berkeley.

In developing Dabble, did you see a gap in the current video space that led you to develop the product or was there some other inspiration behind the idea?

Yes.. in early 2005, there were only about 3 video hosters (Google video hadn’t yet come online) and so people I was working with were skeptical that we needed video search since it wasn’t too hard to go search three sites. But by the winter of 2005, there were 50+ and it was becoming clear that search in a very particular domain with very particular metadata and activity would be very helpful. Also, we realized that discovery was much more important than search, but that if we did what we needed to for search, we would also make discovery easy.

Given the competitive landscape that you are in on the West Coast, how do you attract and maintain good talent?

We are working on something interesting, so we have a lot of people who come to us. But you are right that its hard to find good people. I think people really like the challenge we’ve laid out for ourselves. It’s meaty.

When the company was in my apartment, I would make lunch for the engineers once a week or so, but now that we are in an office space, that’s harder. Though I did get lunch the other day. But I try to make them cookies or something now and then. We also do a daily stand up for engineering which I think helps people feel coordinated and in sync.

Since Dabble does not host any videos directly, does this free you up from any potential legal issues that may arise?

Yes, because we aren’t hosting we can point to videos around the web, but not be liable for distribution. We work with the owners of video like Comedy Central to show their videos at their site. We are still working with hosters and others to show the right videos. We want to be as agnostic and neutral as possible.

What is your favorite video out right now that you have a shortcut for in Dabble?

Here is a playlist for God, Inc. It’s terrific!
http://dabble.com/playlist/6726751

Also, here is a video I absolutely love, that I found online through a Dabble recommendation:
http://dabble.com/node/390690

Copyright © 2007 by Will Kern

Talkonaut is a mobile Jabber client that allows users to free chat to Jabber/XMPP, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM contacts; participate in conference rooms and make voice calls to Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo and SIP contacts or other phones using our VoIP infrastructure. Evgeny Korolenko has extensive experience in software development. While he was a student, he worked for a telecommunications company in Tyumen and developed ISP and ITSP billing systems. Later, when he was a postgraduate, he led a team of developers at Tyumen State Oil and Gas University which built a corporate information system for his Alma Mater completely based on Web technologies. Personal interests: cars, skiing.

Ruslan Zalata – while he was a student at TSOGU, he worked for a number of Russian telecommunications companies as a UNIX system administrator, network engineer and consultant. Later, as a postgraduate, he led a group of network technicians who first designed and built a university corporate network, then a city-wide educational network infrastructure in Tyumen, Russia (the project was sponsored by the regional government). Personal interests: big jeep cars, extreme sports: snowboarding and inline skates. Do you see the mobile IM market really taking off, or do you think that it will take more time before it reaches critical mass?

Definitely. People are ready for something better than SMS. They want to have chats with their friends around the Globe on PCs and mobiles, no matter what IM systems they belong to. They want to participate in cool text chat rooms, they want to use the whole power of presence and they don’t want to pay $0.10 (sometimes even more) for each 170 bytes of text they send. Finally, that’s the coolest way to utilize their data plans they already paid for :-).

Being a Russian based company, what have you found to be the biggest obstacles in breaking into the US market?

Speaking about mobile markets, we quickly understood that in US there’s no real competition between carriers. But what is worse, carriers did their best to tie up users to their services either by locking handsets (so you cannot easily switch to another carrier nor can you run third party apps like Talkonaut) or by offering much cheaper, but very limited data plans which makes it impossible to use third party apps. What is most annoying is that handset developers (like RIM with their BlackBerry) are following the game. It’s virtually impossible to work around mobile carriers if you want to make a buck. If you try to you will probably lose. European and Asian markets are very different, users here can easily switch between carriers just by replacing a SIM card (one can have a single SIM card tie to many carriers which allows switching fast :-)) and can use their phones with the apps they like. But this also may change once mobile VoIP and IM become extremely popular and carriers will face a need either to take “protective” measures or to adjust to new rules and this will be a very uneasy way go for them.

The other thing which upsets us most is that US customers and investors don’t trust any services provided by companies which are not based in the Bay Area (or at least in US). There are some exceptions of course (namely Skype), but the fact is you cannot get very popular if you are a Russian based startup. That is why we are in a search for partners in US (mainly other small startup companies) who are interested in integrating our developments into theirs to achieve even better products or services for users and to benefit us both.

Since there were two of you that founded Talkonaut, what has been the decision making process for determining who does what?

Actually we have two projects running: GTalk2VoIP and Talkonaut. GTalk2VoIP is an open VoIP gatewaying service for major VoIM clients (Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo) which allows user to make free calls between different types of VoIM networks and paid calls to PSTN. This service was born as a “proof of concept” research by my colleague Ruslan Zalata when we worked together for the IT department at the local university. There’s an article at http://www.gtalk2voip.com/article1_en.html written by him on how the gateway was created and turned into a public service in March of 2006. Some months later (July 2006) we came to a thought that bringing all these VoIP services combined with IM to mobiles might be a very decent idea, so we started to work on it nightly. Ruslan worked on the server side part and I was developing the mobile application. Actually, I already had my own J2ME framework done, so it allowed us to build the feature-rich Talkonaut app in a very short period of time. At the moment of public run of Talkonaut (it was November 2006) our first project let us get some financial independence, so we completely quit our day jobs and started pumping it up with both server and app features.

Ruslan also does customer support over emails and on the forum because he has some experience in this and has better English knowledge. All paper work is done together. Usually a question “who does what” does not arise because each does what he’s best at.

What is your favorite cell phone of all time?

We have tried a lot of handsets. Some are very good, others less. But, what you should avoid is any Windows Mobile based device. It’s hard to explain all the negative user experiences you get with Windows Mobile, but believe me it’s ridiculous and completely not a suited OS to be used on phones. Ruslan enjoys his Sony-Ericsson W850i now and I’m currently using Nokia E60. But the best mobile phone is yet to be developed .

Copyright © 2007 by Will Kern